How Cam Models Make Money

It was Benjamin Franklin who took credit for enlightening the world with the wisdom that only death and taxes are certain. While few would argue that the man spoke truth, he may have done well to add the immortality of the sex industry to his short list of life’s predictable conditions. From peep shows and stripteases all the way to the oldest profession itself, throughout human history, there has always been a buck to be made arousing and gratifying lust.

Online Sexual Companionship

But even the sex industry is not immune to changes brought about by what could perhaps have been Franklin’s fourth great certainty: the inevitable march of technology. In the 21st century, women (and it is overwhelmingly women) can try their hand at webcam modeling, a form of sex work in which they use webcams to livestream typically pornographic performances in which they themselves star. An aspiring cam model (sometimes called a “cam girl”, among a host of other monikers) need only find an audience to take a swing at the job, and as one might imagine, that isn’t difficult. Once she finds some online sugar daddies, she can be in for an avalanche of material good fortune.

Entire websites have been established to facilitate the entrepreneurship of these young women, and they all operate under virtually the same basic structure. Each cam model is provided with her own channel on which to stream her performance. The shows themselves are offered to the public at no charge, as the ready availability of free pornography on the internet makes a pay wall at this stage a losing proposition.

However, upon visiting the site, men (to again generalize according to the overwhelming majority of a demographic) are encouraged to purchase digital “tokens”, good for offering in-channel “tips” to their favorite performers. Most of these tips are of modest sums, perhaps the equivalent of a few dollars at a time. If you’re a natural at webcamming, though, you can really bring in a huge amount of tokens in just one night. The numbers that some top cam models are doing would simply floor you.

Online Sugar Daddy Whales

Every cam girl, of course, dreams of being visited by what are known in the business as “whales”, which describes a category of voyeurs with deep pockets who seem to think nothing of dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a single tip. Whatever her final earnings, the website hosting a girl will take a cut of her tokens, before paying out the remainder to her in cash.

A girl can see exactly who tips her, and how much, which typically leads her to (in no way gently) encourage competition among her followers. This may take the form of rewarding high tippers with increased personal attention, gifts such as pre-recorded pornographic videos, or the honoring of specific requests from the audience member. Cooperation can be lucrative, too, and cam models will often post signs promising to perform particular sex acts once the total value of the room’s tips meets a certain arbitrary sum.

Other means of compensation exist for the cam model, as well. For instance, most sites enable her to maintain “wish lists” of items she would like to receive as gifts. These can range from the mundane to the big-ticket, and are an effective way for a girl to capitalize on the generosity of whales. Similar to the sugar baby game, girls in the camming industry can find themselves receiving expensive gifts right out of the blue. Online sugar daddies absolutely love lavishing trinkets and goodies on their favorite ladies.

No matter how you look at it, being an online sugar baby or cam girl is now one of the easiest on-ramps to a high-class lifestyle, and it looks like the “online companionship” business isn’t going away any time soon.